This invention is related to telecommunications systems, and more particularly to an electronic digital signal processor-controlled telecommunications system for the recognition of spoken commands and for the directing of telephone calls based on spoken commands.
It is well-known that many of the safety hazards of cellular telephone use could be alleviated by utilizing automatic speech recognition. While telephone-based speech recognition systems are known, cellular voice dialing over a mobile telephone exchange (xe2x80x9cMTXxe2x80x9d) presents significant challenges for two basic reasons. First, the recognition technology must accommodate a tremendous range of both remotely-mounted and hand-held microphone types. Second, the signal may be band-limited and degraded in transmission to the MTX where the recognition system will be located. Voice-controlled dialers of the prior art, such as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 4,853,953 to Fujisaki, have not been successfully implemented in the cellular environment.
There is therefore a need for voice recognition systems for use in the cellular, satelite and and personal communications network environments that overcome these and other problems of the prior art and that facilitate the use of voice-dialing and other safety and convenience features.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to describe an implementation of a speech recognition system in a cellular or personal communications network environment.
It is a further object of the invention to describe a speech recognition system for use at a mobile telephone exchange (MTX) of a cellular or personal communications network. The placement of the speech recognition system at the MTX significantly reduces cost and increases reliability by enabling the switch vendor to install and maintain the system in conjunction with the cellular switch.
It is another object of the invention to describe a cellular voice dialing system for use in or in conjunction with an MTX of a cellular network.
It is still another object of the invention to use voice recognition techniques to secure access to a cellular or personal communications network.
Another object of the invention is to provide for combined use of speaker-dependent and speaker-independent voice recognition and speaker verification techniques in an MTX of a cellular or personal communications telephone network.
These and other objects of the invention are provided in an advanced system for the recognizing of spoken commands over the cellular telephone or any personal communications (i.e., any non-wireline) network. In the cellular application, for example, a Speech Recognition System interconnects either internally with or as an external peripheral to a cellular telecommunications MTX switch. The Speech Recognition System includes an administrative subsystem, a call processing subsystem, a speaker-dependent recognition subsystem, a speaker-independent recognition subsystem, and a data storage subsystem. The Speech Recognition System also allows for increased efficiency in the cellular telephone network by integrating with the switch or switches as a shared resource. The administrative subsystem of the Speech Recognition System is used to keep statistical logs of pertinent call information. Pre-recorded instructional messages are stored in the memory of the call processing subsystem for instructing a user on his or her progress in using the system. The speaker-independent recognition subsystem allows the user to interact with the system employing non-user specific functions. User specific functions are controlled with the speaker-dependent recognition subsystem. User specific attributes collected by the recognition subsystems are stored in the data storage subsystem.
The foregoing has outlined some of the more pertinent objects of the present invention. These objects should be construed to be merely illustrative of some of the more prominent features and applications of the invention. Many other beneficial results can be attained by applying the disclosed invention in a different manner or modifying the invention as will be described. Accordingly, other objects and a fuller understanding of the invention may be had by referring to the following Detailed Description of the preferred embodiment.